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Culture Vulture: reviews round-up

The Bridge: the Life and Rise of Barack Obama by David Remnick

"Remnick's book is not impartial", writes Robert Harris in the Times, "The editor of The New Yorker, [Remnick] is overwhelmingly sympathetic to his subject. But then, in the context of the wider story of the black struggle for equality in America, how could he not be?"

Gwen Ifill, writing for the Washington Post, says: "Remnick efficiently strips some of the gloss off the version Obama offered in his best-selling 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father. [He] deserves credit for telling Obama's story more completely than others, for lending a reporter's zeal to the task, for not ducking the discussion of race and for peeling back several layers of the onion that is Barack Obama."

"The great achievement of The Bridge is the sheer voluminousness of its coverage", writes Patricia Williams in the Guardian."The structure of the book resembles nothing less than an epic, like the Aeneid, or a morality tale, like Pilgrim's Progress."

"The Bridge" will be reviewed in the forthcoming New Statesman.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

This "accomplished and thrillingly suspenseful new novel travels back more than 200 years", writes Peter Kemp in The Times. Dejima is an artificial island offshore from Nagasaki, "a place where two empires chafe against each other." Kemp continues: "As his earlier works have shown, Mitchell is restless with genres . . . Switching style, mood and tone, while continuing to deal with the same themes, is a hallmark of his fiction. Here, this is adroitly effected." In the Telegraph, Holly Kyte says it will "doubtless earn Mitchell his fourth Man Booker nomination, and, if there's any justice, his first win."

Elsewhere, Henry Hitchings argues in the Financial Times that for all its "moments of brilliance" Mitchell's rich imagery occasionally borders on the "self-indulgent", whilst in the New Statesman, Leo Robson calls the book "a disappointment." "The basic narrative grammar is treated as a succession of boxes to be ticked, or hoops to be jumped through", he writes. "The juggling of divergent perspectives in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas, the adolescent solipsism of number9dream and Black Swan Green, have ill-equipped [Mitchell] for the challenges of the multi-character set-piece novel."

In-Flight Entertainment by Helen Simpson

"Simpson's talent for compression, and for working first-person perceptions seamlessly into a third-person narrative serves her well", writes the Guardian's Christopher Tayler of this short story collection loosely themed on climate change. For him Simpson "brings together an impressive number of micro-strands - parents, children, adultery, gardening, the Tudors - without becoming jumbled, congested or hard to follow, and comes to a sharp point." In the Times, Kate Webb agrees: "it is packaged with Simpson's deadpan wit - she is one of the most sharply funny writers in England today."

In the Independent, James Urquhart disagrees: "despite the muscular strength and succinct entertainment of the stories, the doomish density of her headline theme somehow dissipates the pithy attack that is the hallmark of Simpson's style." Likewise, Lorna Bradbury in the Telegraph argues: "the problem with the collection is that though the title story is well observed, the references to climate change elsewhere feel forced . . . It's difficult to believe that this issue drives relationships, and one wonders whether Simpson is straining for coherence in the collection."

Despite these criticisms, however, Amanda Craig in the New Statesman writes that at her best, Simpson can "easily beat other admired authors such as Lorrie Moore and Carol Shields."

Leader: The unresolved Eurozone crisis

The eurozone crisis was never resolved. It was merely conveniently forgotten. The vote for Brexit, the terrible war in Syria and Donald Trump’s election as US president all distracted from the single currency’s woes. Yet its contradictions endure, a permanent threat to continental European stability and the future cohesion of the European Union.

The resignation of the Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi, following defeat in a constitutional referendum on 4 December, was the moment at which some believed that Europe would be overwhelmed. Among the champions of the No campaign were the anti-euro Five Star Movement (which has led in some recent opinion polls) and the separatist Lega Nord. Opponents of the EU, such as Nigel Farage, hailed the result as a rejection of the single currency.

An Italian exit, if not unthinkable, is far from inevitable, however. The No campaign comprised not only Eurosceptics but pro-Europeans such as the former prime minister Mario Monti and members of Mr Renzi’s liberal-centrist Democratic Party. Few voters treated the referendum as a judgement on the monetary union.

To achieve withdrawal from the euro, the populist Five Star Movement would need first to form a government (no easy task under Italy’s complex multiparty system), then amend the constitution to allow a public vote on Italy’s membership of the currency. Opinion polls continue to show a majority opposed to the return of the lira.

But Europe faces far more immediate dangers. Italy’s fragile banking system has been imperilled by the referendum result and the accompanying fall in investor confidence. In the absence of state aid, the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the world’s oldest bank, could soon face ruin. Italy’s national debt stands at 132 per cent of GDP, severely limiting its firepower, and its financial sector has amassed $360bn of bad loans. The risk is of a new financial crisis that spreads across the eurozone.

EU leaders’ record to date does not encourage optimism. Seven years after the Greek crisis began, the German government is continuing to advocate the failed path of austerity. On 4 December, Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, declared that Greece must choose between unpopular “structural reforms” (a euphemism for austerity) or withdrawal from the euro. He insisted that debt relief “would not help” the immiserated country.

Yet the argument that austerity is unsustainable is now heard far beyond the Syriza government. The International Monetary Fund is among those that have demanded “unconditional” debt relief. Under the current bailout terms, Greece’s interest payments on its debt (roughly €330bn) will continually rise, consuming 60 per cent of its budget by 2060. The IMF has rightly proposed an extended repayment period and a fixed interest rate of 1.5 per cent. Faced with German intransigence, it is refusing to provide further funding.

Ever since the European Central Bank president, Mario Draghi, declared in 2012 that he was prepared to do “whatever it takes” to preserve the single currency, EU member states have relied on monetary policy to contain the crisis. This complacent approach could unravel. From the euro’s inception, economists have warned of the dangers of a monetary union that is unmatched by fiscal and political union. The UK, partly for these reasons, wisely rejected membership, but other states have been condemned to stagnation. As Felix Martin writes on page 15, “Italy today is worse off than it was not just in 2007, but in 1997. National output per head has stagnated for 20 years – an astonishing . . . statistic.”

Germany’s refusal to support demand (having benefited from a fixed exchange rate) undermined the principles of European solidarity and shared prosperity. German unemployment has fallen to 4.1 per cent, the lowest level since 1981, but joblessness is at 23.4 per cent in Greece, 19 per cent in Spain and 11.6 per cent in Italy. The youngest have suffered most. Youth unemployment is 46.5 per cent in Greece, 42.6 per cent in Spain and 36.4 per cent in Italy. No social model should tolerate such waste.

“If the euro fails, then Europe fails,” the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has often asserted. Yet it does not follow that Europe will succeed if the euro survives. The continent that once aspired to be a rival superpower to the US is now a byword for decline, and ethnic nationalism and right-wing populism are thriving. In these circumstances, the surprise has been not voters’ intemperance, but their patience.